Working Birthday announce the return of Freud The Musical is coming to Reading Fringe Festival on 27 July 2018. Based on the true-life account of Sigmund Freud’s cocaine abuse this comedy gleefully annihilates the father of modern psychology in a flurry of cross-dressing and dick jokes.

Natasha Sutton Williams gives a fearless performance, playing all the characters including the bombastic and desperately addicted Freud and his patients: the raging lesbian Dora, the anal Rat Man and Little Hans the original Freudian motherfucker.

Music is provided by piano accompanist Micah Rose-Trespeuchand a soundscape of looped voices is created live each night. The score features thirteen original tunes, including maybe the finest song ever written about sticking rats up your anus.

Quotes

Writer and performer Natasha Sutton Williams says: “I was inspired to perform Freud The Musical as a one-woman show by my mentor Willy Russell. I had originally written the show for six actors. He saw me perform a section of it solo and told me to go for it, do whatever it took to get it on stage, so it became a one-woman show and it worked.”

Co-Producer Bern Roche Farrelly says: “The time is ripe for the return of Natasha’s feminist take on Freud. Her iconoclastic performance is pure joy. It’s like watching someone give the patriarchy a wedgie.”

The production premièred at the Space Theatre in 2015, exactly 100 years after Freud put forward his Theory of the Unconscious.

In 2016 the show was performed for an extended run at the King’s Head Theatre.

This year marks 100 years since Freud wrote his theory on Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality.

The show features 13 original songs composed by Natasha Sutton Williams.

During each performance Natasha Sutton Williams creates live soundscapes and sings duets with herself using a digital loop station.

The show features two puppets: one representing Freud’s most famous client Little Hans, and another representing a family of singing, anally fixated rats.

The show is based on real life accounts of Sigmund Freud’s cocaine use, first detailed in David Cohan’s Freud On Coke https://tinyurl.com/FreudOnCoke

Early in his career Freud wrote one of the first scientific studies of cocaine entitled Über Coca, known as ‘a song of praise to this magical substance’ https://tinyurl.com/UberCoca

In 2017 Natasha Sutton Williams, Bern Roche Farrelly and Stephanie Weller set up Working Birthday Theatre Company to create entertaining shows about difficult subjects.

Natasha Sutton Williams – Full Biography

Natasha Sutton Williams is a playwright, composer and performer. Her work includes Dead Lucy at Southwark Playhouse, Brasserie Zedel, Waterloo East Theatre, Angel Comedy Club, Clown Sex at Arcola Theatre, Chelsea Theatre, Bunker Theatre, Angel Comedy Club, Freud The Musical at King’s Head Theatre, Space Theatre, Brother Don't Preach at Theatre 503, Prone to Mischief at Old Red Lion Theatre, and I AM NOT SICK at the Pleasance Theatre.

She is a graduate of the West End Criterion Theatre’s new writing programme 2017. She is a member of the Soho Theatre’s Young Writers’ Alumni scheme and has been twice shortlisted for their Young Writers’ Award. She is an arts journalist for London Calling and Disability Arts Online.

Natasha performed as an actor-musician in Orpheus and Eurydice at the Old Vic Tunnels, London. She was lead singer in the Chaplin SongsCabaret performed at the Berlin Silent Film Festival, which was also recorded for German radio. She was one of two singers for the National Theatre’s production of Women Beware Women.

Natasha sings early jazz and musical theatre internationally and composes and performs the music for her plays. She is currently co-writing a new musical More More More, which is in development with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new theatre The Other Palace.